Word: koizumi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wave of popular support - Koizumi comes in with a 65 percent approval rating - got the rebel this far. But having given Koizumi his shot, the calcified, self-preservationist LDP elders will not be as eager to watch him engineer their downfall. Koizumi, who likes to talk about changing Japanese elections to bypass the LDP machinery, started incurring factional wrath on his first day in office Friday with his old-guard-snubbing cabinet selections...
...watch is on to see whether Koizumi will fail by pragmatism, by cutting too many of the usual wheel-greasing deals with the party elders to try and effect change - or by idealism, by cutting too few. Popular support? The LDP hasn't lasted 46 years by listening to the whims of the Japanese voters, and the Japanese voters didn't keep the LDP in power for 46 years because they were much more eager than their politicians to endure the pain of real reform...
...there is little optimism for Koizumi's chances at effecting reform and Japan's for effecting a recovery, for the first time in a long time there is hope. Hope that Japan's government can face reality and do what is plainly necessary to restore the vibrancy of the world's second-largest economy at a time when the U.S. and Europe are both in mini-funks of their own. Hope that Japan, both politically and economically, is finally ready for change...
...fear. Koizumi says plainly - and rightly - that Japan's economy needs a sharper, deeper recession before it can pull out of its current, shallow one. Should Koizumi defy the odds and prove a wild success, a period of creative destruction in Japan could extend and deepen the current global slump. Yet after a decade of slow decay, it is no time to be squeamish about bleeding Japan in order to save...
...Junichiro Koizumi is not squeamish about change. He's been pushing for the same reforms since the mid-'90s, and has been around the government long enough to know where the medicine has to go and who has to swallow it. The stomachs of the rest of the government - and the voters, who loved Koizumi for what he's against but may not feel the same about what he's for - are quite another matter...